Held over three days at Barraga Bay on the NSW South Coast, this year’s Four Winds Music Festival will be a special one for Walbunga and Ngarigo artist and producer Cheryl Davison.

“I think it’s going to be a moment of hope for the community,” she tells Limelight.

Davison is the prime mover of Djinama Yilaga, an intergenerational Yuin choir drawing its members from the south coast region. Its Four Winds concert, titled Madbu and performed with the Australian String Quartet, represents the culmination of several years of work and the overcoming of no end of adversity.

“With the bushfires and the pandemic and a lot of sorry business in the community, the last few years have been a pretty hard time,” says Davison. “I see this as a real chance to bring our Mob together again.”

Working as Four Winds’ Aboriginal Creative Producer, Davison was instrumental in founding Djinama Yilaga in 2019, a project with a mission to reinforce community, preserve and promote culture, and encourage the use of Dhurga language – the lingua franca of the 13 tribes of the Yuin Nation and the dominant tongue of the Walbunga people of the Broulee region and the Brinja Yuin people of...